Black Europe Film Festival

After the screening, directors Cece Mlay and Agnes Lisa Wegner will join remotely for a conversation and Q&A.

ABOUT THE FILM

"An essential story for today." The Berliner

More than a century after the Maji Maji resistance, the families of Tanzanian leaders executed by German colonial forces are still waiting for justice. Their ancestors’ remains—taken for racist “research”—never returned home.

THE EMPTY GRAVE follows two families on parallel journeys: John Mbano, searching for the remains of his great-grandfather Songea Mbano, and the Kaaya family, fighting for the return of Chief Mangi Lobulu Kaaya. From rural Tanzania to Berlin’s museum basements and government corridors, their search moves through archives, classrooms, protests, and painful encounters with history’s unfinished business.

Intimate and political, THE EMPTY GRAVE reveals how colonial violence persists in the present—not only in institutions, but in bodies, memory, and mourning. A film about grief, dignity, and the long struggle to bring the dead home.

ABOUT THE DIRECTORS

Directors: Cece Mlay is a Tanzania-based filmmaker who values the communal work of filmmaking and works with Kijiweni Productions as an Assistant Director and Creative Supervisor. Agnes Lisa Wegner studied in Berlin and at Harvard and worked with German human rights organizations before turning to filmmaking; her documentaries engage questions of discrimination, racism, human rights, and solidarity.